March 08, 2004

• My first computer was a frikin' Sinclair ZX80. You had to assemble the damn thing. And then type in loads of code before it even did 'owt. they were crap. My first console was the one you posted, the Atari 2600 with the fake wood on the front. Fave game: Adventure. Or whatever it was. the one you had to get the keys back from the dragons. Shit, I think I mutated my hands mangling those ugly damn joysticks, they were unmoveable. Actually, my uncles bought one of the first PONG consoles if you can call 'em that, some years earlier, but I only have vague memories of that.
• Wow, that takes me back. VIC 20 was our first computer, too. After that it was an 8/88(?) that my mom hooked up to the phone and proceeded to accrue a phone bill of well over $1000 playing some network game. She apparently thought it didn't count because she wasn't TALKING on the phone. My dad almost had a coronary over that one.
• Yeah, same with Atari. Space Invaders and Asteroids (I LOVED Asteroids) were awesome. We did the PONG thing, too. Man, if only I could have had a glimpse of what was to come, I would have done some serious investing!!!!!!
• No one will have heard of this console: the Kingsway Atari clone (near the bottom). Every game you could imagine at the time built-in, but the joysticks were trashed and had to be replaced on a yearly (at least) basis. As for computers, I learned at high school on Apple Mac Classic, used my then-boyfriend's (now husband) 486 for a few years, parents had a C-64, built my own computer at last in 2000 and still have it. Husband's list: ZX81 VIC 20 C-128D Commodore IBM XT knockoff Amiga 500 386 converted to 486 ...and so on. At some point we had a Dick Smith VZ-200 (Spectrum knockoff) and another Amiga 500. I persuaded him to part ways with them when we went overseas.
• Another C 64, which didn't interest me at all, really. Later got some Amstrad thing running CPM+ on 3 inch floppies, then a Mac Plus. I loved my Plus.
• I learned on a TRS-80 in Jr. High School. Still waiting for the monkey(s) that programmed using punch-cards.
• My first was a TI-99/4A. Proud home of Hunt The Wumpus. Followed by an Apple II GS. Aahh... Wumpus... I knew the rules, but for some reason I always felt that once I found the Wumpus I should get to fight it. Instead, the game would tell me I was dead and that I'd have to start over.
• I'm not qualified to be a techie (my dad is, tho - affiliate membership, maybe?), but I recall fondly my PONG console before I was ten. Dad bought it at an exorbitant price (he says). But my favourite was good'ole Speak and Spell; it was my best buddy. We had something with a teeny-tiny screen, and I practiced my Wordstar skills on it back in '82 or '83? I recall being terribly impressed by how many colours the screen had. Then there was my HTML trainer who asked what was the oldest program anyone in class could remember. Most people said MS Office. When I said Wordstar, he looked at me and said,"Funny, you don't look my age." He was forty-five.
• Still waiting for the monkey(s) that programmed using punch-cards. I was a punch-card user. But I couldn't afford the computer, and neither could very much most people at that time.
• Great post. Looking at this stuff reminds me that the $150 phone in my pocket has better features, resolution, storage, power, and connectivity than the $4000 ][gs I got for my bar mitzvah.
• My first. Ahh, to think how much 48k once seemed. Which brings me to Hey Hey 16K, from M J Hibbert.
• Excellent post. Cheers
• My old Amstrad was a monster -- in fact, I found I was better off using a typewriter. It was 1998 before I got another computer, by then I found the machines wonderfully improved.
• My first was the sheer decadent power of the Acorn Electron. Thirty two enormous kilobytes of RAM in this baby. I remember begging my parents for hours to input the "infinite lives" code into Monty Mole (this was at the time when you had to program your own cheat codes). My next was an NES, but I was always turned off slightly by its impersonal approach and personality-free raw speed.
• I think I must have been a late developer in this respect - my first was an Amstrad PCW; probably unknown outside the UK; basically a computer for people who were in denial and wanted to pretend it was just for writing novels on. You didn't have to worry about it becoming obsolete because every single element in the package was comprehensively obsolete when it was launched. The (non-standard, naturally)keyboard had a nice comforting button with 'Stop' on it, though, just in case you accidentally triggered a nuclear strike (a very real fear for some new users, I can tell you). Incidentally, I have never been able to throw a computer away. The old ones just sit and fester. I tell my wife they still work almost perfectly, and one day I could wire them up to control the central heating or something. She says I couldn't. (Commenting on my ability or witholding permission - who knows?)
• my first computer experience was with the university one in 1979...for my thesis. i had 100 subjects with about 100 variables each and had to score my sheets with pencil to get data in the computer and then use those punchcards to tell the computer what to do with it. it was a very iffy process. things would disappear and i'd have to travel all around the campus to see if my printouts had been delivered somewhere else. i later picked up one of those commodore units and learned dos...but then the ibm clones arrived and i got an atari that i kept updating. i used this until i moved to the city in 1998 and finally could access the internet without long-distance telephone charges. now i've been using the same h-p for four years with simple upgrades to ram only. and new peripherals. it's an old workhorse....will hate to see it go.
• My first computer was the TI-99/4A. I didn't have the extended BASIC cartridge for it, so it limited my ability to program read and write routines for years to come. My nerdiest moment was when I was 11 or 12 years old auditing a programming course at the local university. We were programming on the TRS-80 Model III's. Good fun, good fun.
• This really takes me back! Aside from some COBOL and FORTRAN punchcard stuff in high school, the first computer at home was a Heathkit 4k (yep, that's four thousand bytes) with a ten-key input and LED display that only understood machine language, followed by a C-64 used to run a BBS and that ugly AOL pre-cursor, Quantum-Link. Saved up for a used Mac SE/30, which I still own and love too much to part with- System 6 still brings a small tear to my eye. Went the 2/3/486 route, then got a Mac IIcs and have stayed with the platform ever since.
• Darn! Sorry for the double post!
• The history of computing is very sad, too. Alan Turing: convicted of homosexuality, and forced to take oestrogen injections, before finally committing suicide. Gary Kildall: ripped off by Microsoft, then killed in a pub fight.